Professor Doctor Fiona Sampson has been published in more than thirty-five languages.
She has sixteen books in translation, and has received the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia) and
the Charles Angoff Award (US), and been shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Prize for
European Women Poets. From 2005-2012 she was the Editor in Chief of Poetry Review;
she is now the Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, where she is the
Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre and Editor of Poem. A Fellow and Council
Member of the Royal Society of Literature, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow
of the English Association and Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust, her publications
include twenty-seven volumes of poetry, criticism and philosophy of language. She has
received the Newdigate Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship,
Kathleen Blundell and Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from the Society of Authors,
a number of Writer’s Awards from both the English and the Welsh Arts Councils, and
several Poetry Book Society commendations, and she has been shortlisted twice for both
the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prizes. She has held a number of international
fellowships and served on international juries in Canada, Ireland, Slovenia and the UK.
She writes frequently for the national press and frequently presents on BBC national
radio, and has collaborated with leading musicians, scientists and artists. Her Selected
Poems recently appeared in the US (2013) China (2014), Romania (2015) and Ukraine
(2015). This spring she published The Catch (Penguin) and this autumn Lyric Cousins:
Musical Form in Poetry appears. She is at work on a new biography of Mary Shelley.
Dante’s Cave
Velika Dolina, Skocjan
Finally I came
to the end of the world
to a limestone cliff
falling in pale steps
and far below a pool
somehow out of myth
proving that there
was nothing but the rock
to hold me up to raise me
into that clear air
where crows were looping where the eye
of God was gold
and inattentive then
I saw the end is air
and falling it is clean
and lovely it is blue.
Ancestors
see them walking
between trees I
but seeing is
no more than guessing
at the shapes
darkly printed
in the dark
as if the past
were all one cave
where we squat
uncomprehending
by our fire
as our dreams
flicker behind us
on the wall
where we have placed
our hands where once
we placed our hands
wanting to catch
what we saw moving
there those beasts
leaping and falling
in the dark
as if they could be
ours as if
they came to us
and became us
because of firelight
Arcades
In the morning air
voices fill and empty
beside the barn under
the walnut trees
one continual linked pouring
the way arcades go
linking and pouring linked
and poured their speech is one
continual discourse
raising hands to gesture
speaking on and on
in the shade under
the cypress trees they do not
know the morning or the evening
when it comes
they only know this speaking
that rises and falls
in them like song.
